# Can you suggest a UPS to prevent wine cooler to reset back to 55F after power surge?



## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

Can you suggest a UPS system to prevent wine cooler to reset back to 55F after power surge?


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## dj1340 (Mar 30, 2009)

Any UPS should work. Just make sure you check the power rating on the wine cooler and get a UPS that
will handle it. Some of the lower wattage UPS's work fine on computers but may not handle your cooler


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

Thanks.


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

Well Seeing how I work for Schneider Electric and rep APC and MGE UPS systems I have to recommend for a small application like a wine cooler to use an APC model. 
If your cooler is a TEC unit a small 500vA is more than plenty. I have a 5kVA in my basement with 10 hours of batteries that powers Home entertainment, my wineador, fire and security and several strategically placed lights then a 20kVA generator with a 200A automatic transfer switch so when I go 30 seconds with no power the generator starts and transfers automatically. Its enough to run my entire house.


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## magoo6541 (Mar 9, 2014)

Oh wow. I was looking at these last night and was wondering what model I would need. I almost started a thread but decided to hold off.

Thanks for doing so and thanks to those who answered.


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

Np  And thanks for all the answers.


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## magoo6541 (Mar 9, 2014)

I was out today and close by a Best Buy so while my girlfriend and her daughter were shopping for clothes, I went shopping for a APC. They stocked a good selection from basic ones all the way to a 1500vA model. I was tempted by it just to know that it would handle the wineador but I settled on the 1080 model. I wanted one that had a display of battery condition, time remaining, energy saver ect ect.

I got it home, plugged the battery in and plugged it in. I'm really impressed by it. It's very simple to use, setup and understand.

I plugged the windador into the master battery backup outlet. The battery time remaining showed that at idle, it would last around 6 hours. I clicked the temp down to turn the unit on and the battery life settled to around 70 minutes. I think that's pretty darn good.

I plugged my fans into the energy saver outlets that are not battery backed up. This is a really cool feature. When the wineador is at idle and not drawing much power, the unit shuts down power to the energy saver outlets. My fans were running 24/7 but now only run when the unit itself is actively cooling.

I'm guessing that during an actual power outage, the 1080 will power my wineador (NewAir 281) for about 2.5-3 hours give or take...

Very happy. Thank you metinemre for starting the thread and thank you JustinThyme for your earlier response.


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

Nice! Best buy does have good prices on these. Almost as good as my employee discount!


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

i'm glad it's helping us both and probably more members in the future. How much did you pay? Do you think it can handle 2 coolers? A 16 and 28 bottle?


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## magoo6541 (Mar 9, 2014)

The 1080 was around $150 and they had a 1500vA model that was $180 I believe. I almost got it since it was only $30 more but I thought that's $30 for cigars and the 1080 will work for me just fine. 

I think if I was doing 2 wineadors, I might go with a larger one just to ensure you get good time out of it but this will certainly work for a while. With my 281 running I think it shows that it's using around 5% of the available load so it could definitely accommodate more.


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## ssutton219 (Apr 17, 2007)

We have a couple of them for back up power for the computers that control the operations at the plant I work at..never thought about one for a vino but damn that's a great idea!!


The Troll


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## Trackmyer (Jun 6, 2014)

magoo6541 said:


> I'm guessing that during an actual power outage, the 1080 will power my wineador (NewAir 281) for about *2.5-3 hours give or take*...


Sounds great for the short outage of 5 minutes or less. But not so good if power goes out for 5hours and your away from home for the day.


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## Emperor Zurg (May 6, 2013)

Trackmyer said:


> Sounds great for the short outage of 5 minutes or less. But not so good if power goes out for 5hours and your away from home for the day.


It would be ideal if you could separate out the control circuit from the Peltier circuit. That way a very small UPS could maintain your setting for days, albeit without any cooling.

As far as UPS units go, at work I've had 3 APC units fail in as many years. Yeah, they warranty them but still it's a PIA messing around with it, boxing the old one up, sending it back and all that. I finally just threw the last one in the trash when it died and bought a Tripp Lite. It's been going strong for 2 1/2 years now.


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## Gdaddy (Sep 20, 2012)

Emperor Zurg said:


> It would be ideal if you could separate out the control circuit from the Peltier circuit. That way a very small UPS could maintain your setting for days, albeit without any cooling.
> 
> As far as UPS units go, at work I've had 3 APC units fail in as many years. Yeah, they warranty them but still it's a PIA messing around with it, boxing the old one up, sending it back and all that. I finally just threw the last one in the trash when it died and bought a Tripp Lite. It's been going strong for 2 1/2 years now.


Why is the Tripp Lite a better unit?


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## Emperor Zurg (May 6, 2013)

Gdaddy said:


> Why is the Tripp Lite a better unit?


No idea but it cost 3x more than the comparable APC and comparing both units without the batteries, the Tripp Lite is substantially heavier. My guess is the TL is more of a commercial unit and has bigger heat sinks and whatnot inside.


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

Interesting, i will dig different brands more for reliability.


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

Emperor Zurg said:


> No idea but it cost 3x more than the comparable APC and comparing both units without the batteries, the Tripp Lite is substantially heavier. My guess is the TL is more of a commercial unit and has bigger heat sinks and whatnot inside.


You paid 3x more for a Tripplite? Man oh man did you get ripped.

Post up the model you have and the model of APC you had and Ill tell you the difference specifically. UPS's are my specialty and although I work for Schneider Electric Ill tell you honestly straight out of the gate that tripplite does not compare to APC, its not in the same league. You go into a real data center tripplite is not to be found......anywhere. 3 UPS systems rule the market. APC, Liebert and MGE. All tripplite UPS's are line interactive which means they are running on utility until the power fails so you will not know if its working if you are not there to watch it during a power outage. APC units of this size are dual conversion online UPS's so you get not only battery back up but a power conditioner as well, they will not run if the batteries are dead period. Thats part of the pre start test is a quick battery test. If that fails the UPS goes into alarm and will not start. Reasoning being that if the batteries are no good whats the point? That extra weight in the tripplite is the ferroresonant transformer that in conjunction with a capacitor is in theory to collapse its fields and provide just enough juice to get though until the inverter starts and it switches over to battery operation. There is always a sag with this switch even when its working 100% which is why enterprise data centers will not use them. If the load is to heavy they actually do a break transfer for better than 250msec which equates to lost loads.  This is not necessary with dual conversion online UPS's, they are online 100% of the time and the only change that occurs is the direction of current flow on the DC buss when the input rectifier is no longer powered to provide DC to run the inverter and charge the batteries the current begins to discharge from the batteries with 0 transfer time. The power factor of the tripplite is also quite horrible a 0.6 so for a 1500va UPS you only get 900 watts of power. The really big APC UPS's use Delta conversion technology that is still proprietary so I cant go in depth with that other than to say its ultra efficient at 98%. Those UPS go up to 1.6MW and can be paralleled into groups of 5 for 8 million watts of UPS power. You can run a butt load of wineadors off of that!

That 1080 will power a wineador for several hours. 1080va with 1.0 power factor for 1080 watts powering a 70 watt peltier will make it every bit of 3 hours with the peltier running for that entire time which they seldom do.

Most of the time any failure in the smaller units are the batteries. Unfortunately everyone is at the mercy of the battery manufacturers and a 10% infant mortality failure rate is perfectly normal for sealed lead acid batteries. Schneider takes customer satisfaction very seriously (our performance evals are partially based by what results come about when the 3rd party company they hired to do customer surveys reports). If you have an issue with a UPS under warranty they will make it right 100% of the time.


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

Justin, i remember using a ups unit when i had large fish tanks with couple of external filtration systems. At that time my friends made me buy one specific system/ups model that could operate with aquarium filters and motors. Since those motors had magnetic something i cant`t remember the model but what i remember is if i can translate it into English directly it was something like ``Real sinus, online ups`` if that makes sense  Are we using the same stuff for coolers?


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

Pure Sinusoidal waveform online which is what you get out of the APC. There is a reason that APC has 80% of the single phase market share globally. Other less expensive and behind the technology units are line interactive and the inverters do not use pulse width modulation so the output more closely resembles a saw tooth than a smooth sine wave. There is still one UPS on the market that uses very old technology but you see very few of them. Often referred to as a motor/generator you basically have a DC motor turning an AC generator. While input power is available it runs off of the rectifier when its not it runs off of batteries. This is the purest form of power that is 100% isolated because of the mechanical coupling of motor shaft to generator shaft means no electrical common point between the input and output. Problem is they are huge, loud and require a lot more maintenance. Todays market is driven mostly by footprint. Everyone wants the smallest machine with the highest output.


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## metinemre (Jul 26, 2014)

JustinThyme said:


> Pure Sinusoidal waveform online which is what you get out of the APC. There is a reason that APC has 80% of the single phase market share globally. Other less expensive and behind the technology units are line interactive and the inverters do not use pulse width modulation so the output more closely resembles a saw tooth than a smooth sine wave. There is still one UPS on the market that uses very old technology but you see very few of them. Often referred to as a motor/generator you basically have a DC motor turning an AC generator. While input power is available it runs off of the rectifier when its not it runs off of batteries. This is the purest form of power that is 100% isolated because of the mechanical coupling of motor shaft to generator shaft means no electrical common point between the input and output. Problem is they are huge, loud and require a lot more maintenance. Todays market is driven mostly by footprint. Everyone wants the smallest machine with the highest output.


So what magoo purchased can be used for coolers and aquarium filtration canister filters aswell?


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

metinemre said:


> So what magoo purchased can be used for coolers and aquarium filtration canister filters aswell?


Yes

Its what I have my 3 tanks running on, although it be one that's 10x the rating in my basement with extra batteries added and other items on it as well. You just don't want anything that produces a saw tooth or square wave to run that type of motor on. Now when it comes to industrial process, particularly the petro chem industry they have a different concept completely. They all use what known as an offline UPS where the load is being fed by conditioned utility but the inverter is running and the load is switched over via an SCR static switch in the event of input failure. This switch is much faster than the line interactive and take but 4msec or less. This reasoning is that large AC motors that start and stop during process will kick out the UPS on overload every time one of the motors start due to the inrush current which is rated at 6 times that of the nameplate on the motor. So the offline will prevent that and they all have PLCs that will make the necessary process changes if any when the UPS goes online such as finishing up where it was at but not starting another batch process. The idea with these is just to keep the motors running so a volatile process isn't interrupted at a catastrophic point.


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## Emperor Zurg (May 6, 2013)

JustinThyme said:


> You paid 3x more for a Tripplite? Man oh man did you get ripped.
> 
> Post up the model you have and the model of APC you had and Ill tell you the difference specifically.


I may have but I needed something soon and I was done with APC. I don't remember what model it was but it wasn't a tower and it didn't have an LCD display. It was a lay-down unit, probably ~ 8" high, 5" wide and maybe 12" deep. It just had LED status indicators instead of the display that the newest ones have. The Tripp Lite unit is actually smaller than the APC I replaced but it doesn't matter. All I need time to do is shut the computer off properly. It's not like I'm going to sit here and work in the dark. This thing will run my system for around 20 - 30 minutes and it will automatically shut it down if I'm away.

As for the APC units...

After about a year, the first unit just up and quit working. I came in one morning and the computer was off. The APC batteries were still fully charged so I don't think an outage happened, it just totally quit and wouldn't turn on. I had to plug the computer system directly into the wall in order to work that day.

APC warrantied that one and sent me another one. This one also worked about a year. One day I was smelling something hot in my office and tracked it to the UPS. Apparently the voltage regulator to the batteries had given up because it had overcharged to the point that they melted. Both batteries were welded together and bulging out at the sides to the point I had to pry them out of the unit. Testing showed it was charging them in excess of 50 volts.

APC again warrantied the unit and sent another one. The last one lasted just short of a year and started beeping an overheat alarm. Taking it apart, I found a tiny little muffin fan atop a heat sink of some sort. The fan had seized up.

I was done at this point. I threw the offending unit right in the dumpster and went looking for something else. Grainger had a Tripp Lite in stock so that's what I bought. Like I said, it's been 2 1/2 years now and no trouble from the UPS.


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

Emperor Zurg said:


> I may have but I needed something soon and I was done with APC. I don't remember what model it was but it wasn't a tower and it didn't have an LCD display. It was a lay-down unit, probably ~ 8" high, 5" wide and maybe 12" deep. It just had LED status indicators instead of the display that the newest ones have. The Tripp Lite unit is actually smaller than the APC I replaced but it doesn't matter. All I need time to do is shut the computer off properly. It's not like I'm going to sit here and work in the dark. This thing will run my system for around 20 - 30 minutes and it will automatically shut it down if I'm away.
> 
> As for the APC units...
> 
> ...


The batteries are connected in series and 50 volts is the correct charging voltage for 4 batteries, should be two packs of 2 Yuasa NP7-12FR-F1. That one sounds like bad batteries as I stated before. Fans do fail no matter the manufacturer, we have had to change vendors over this and I cant tell you how many hours Ive spent in the field replacing fans that were still working over a recall of bad fans. The first one I cant tell you any reason without further investigation.

Yea if you bought it from Grainger you got shafted. They are a cool company that stocks a lot of stuff but they are probably the highest priced vendor of their kind.

Sorry you had issues and I don't blame you for getting frustrated. I would have probably done the same if I wasn't in the UPS business.


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## KaChong (Jan 1, 2012)

Have you considered using an external temperature control? This one at Auber Instruments is a fair bit cheaper than a UPS:

Universal 1/32 DIN PID Temperature Controller Universal 1/32 DIN PID Temperature Controller [SYL-1512A] - $37.56 : auberins.com, Temperature control solutions for home and industry

It won't keep your cooler running when the power is out, but it has a bit of non volatile memory so it doesn't forget your setting if it gets power resetted. It's also got autotune so you it can provide more constant temperature control than classic on/off closed loop control methods.


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## Pj201 (Apr 27, 2013)

op2::bored:


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## d32 (Jan 26, 2010)

if your cooler uses a thermistor to measure the temp, you can add a resistor or potentiometer (adjustable resistor) inline to reset the default temperature. You basically lie to the microcontroller so it thinks its already colder than it really is. just posted a thread on modding an old vinotemp.


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## magoo6541 (Mar 9, 2014)

Not to dig this back up but thought I'd give a little update.

So far I have 15 events of the UPS backing up power. The longest instance of power being out was while I wasn't home but my girlfriend was. I would have liked to know exactly how long the power was out and what percentage of battery was left on the UPS but I didn't want to ask her to keep track for me.

Anyway, the power was out for at least 4 hours and the UPS powered my 281 the entire time.


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## LGHT (Oct 12, 2009)

magoo6541 said:


> Not to dig this back up but thought I'd give a little update.
> 
> So far I have 15 events of the UPS backing up power. The longest instance of power being out was while I wasn't home but my girlfriend was. I would have liked to know exactly how long the power was out and what percentage of battery was left on the UPS but I didn't want to ask her to keep track for me.
> 
> Anyway, the power was out for at least 4 hours and the UPS powered my 281 the entire time.


Not surprised. When I kept a large 300 gallon tank with a bunch if Piranhas my building had serious power outages all the time. The APC I picked up cost about $200 at the time, but kept my tank solid for more than 24 hours. Granted I was only maintaining air and heat with a small filter I think the meter only dropped to about 50% and saved me a LOT of money in what have been a bunch of fish ready for a fish fry... FYI Piranha's are good eating


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## Blue Raccoon (Mar 13, 2011)

every TR in all of hospitals have rack mounted Lieberts units that will hold all the switches and assorted gear unit the generators kick in. each of them have a POD so you can switch out units without dropping power. overkill for home use.


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## profanitypete (Jul 18, 2014)

magoo6541 said:


> I was out today and close by a Best Buy so while my girlfriend and her daughter were shopping for clothes, I went shopping for a APC. They stocked a good selection from basic ones all the way to a 1500vA model. I was tempted by it just to know that it would handle the wineador but I settled on the 1080 model. I wanted one that had a display of battery condition, time remaining, energy saver ect ect.
> 
> I got it home, plugged the battery in and plugged it in. I'm really impressed by it. It's very simple to use, setup and understand.
> 
> ...


This is actually genius. I was thinking of going with a ronco temp model to control everything, but I truly like this idea - it can manage the fans as well as the wineador! #JustinTyme , do you know which APC models would have enough outlets to run the following?

On Backup:
NewAir AW281E

On Energy Saver:
Circulating fans (would wire to one plug)

On unswitched power with no backup:
Beverage center
Kegerator
2x air purifiers


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## JustinThyme (Jun 17, 2013)

profanitypete said:


> This is actually genius. I was thinking of going with a ronco temp model to control everything, but I truly like this idea - it can manage the fans as well as the wineador! #JustinTyme , do you know which APC models would have enough outlets to run the following?
> 
> On Backup:
> NewAir AW281E
> ...


The consumer grade APC units are all fairly similar in outlet configuration and you generally shop for needed power requirements and amount of back up time. Whatever is plugged into the outlets that have back up power are the ones that are protected, everything else has only a TVSS (transient voltage surge suppression). What I would recommend would be the BR1500G as it supplies more outlets, one of the higher power ratings and most back up time. It may be overkill for the NewAir but you get additional run time and can put the fans on protected source as well. The Kegerator isnt something you would want to put on a small UPS due to the inital current surge every time the compressor starts but would be fine on an unprotected outlet. If the UPS doenst have enough outlets to supply everything you want to plug into it there is nothing that says you can use a power strip. Another point on the larger UPS is the price point between the 1000 and the 1500 is only about $50 more. If you want to one up that you can find 3000Va rack mount units on fleabay for next to nothing used and simply count on replacing the batteries. Thats where I got mine for like $100 (retail is like $1200) and spent another $80 on the batteries and have my wineador, home entertainment, security and fire alarm system, two fish tanks, and the upstairs and downstairs hall lighting. There are companies that come in and clean out data centers and they auction off the contents.

APC Smart UPS 3000VA UPS | eBay


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## profanitypete (Jul 18, 2014)

JustinThyme said:


> The consumer grade APC units are all fairly similar in outlet configuration and you generally shop for needed power requirements and amount of back up time. Whatever is plugged into the outlets that have back up power are the ones that are protected, everything else has only a TVSS (transient voltage surge suppression). What I would recommend would be the BR1500G as it supplies more outlets, one of the higher power ratings and most back up time. It may be overkill for the NewAir but you get additional run time and can put the fans on protected source as well. The Kegerator isnt something you would want to put on a small UPS due to the inital current surge every time the compressor starts but would be fine on an unprotected outlet. If the UPS doenst have enough outlets to supply everything you want to plug into it there is nothing that says you can use a power strip. Another point on the larger UPS is the price point between the 1000 and the 1500 is only about $50 more. If you want to one up that you can find 3000Va rack mount units on fleabay for next to nothing used and simply count on replacing the batteries. Thats where I got mine for like $100 (retail is like $1200) and spent another $80 on the batteries and have my wineador, home entertainment, security and fire alarm system, two fish tanks, and the upstairs and downstairs hall lighting. There are companies that come in and clean out data centers and they auction off the contents.
> 
> APC Smart UPS 3000VA UPS | eBay


Thanks for the insight!


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